"CHRISTIANS WILL BE MASSACRED": If Syrian Army Leaves Aleppo, Chaldean Catholic Leader Warns

CHRISTIANS WILL BE MASSACRED: If Syrian army leaves Aleppo, faithful will be killed, Chaldean Catholic leader warns" Catholic Online, September 17, 2013

Chaldean Catholic Church in Syria in complete unity with the Holy See, Pope Francis
The
United States ostensibly backs the rebel factions in war-torn Syria,
but as one Christian leader that has ministered to the faithful in the
Middle East warns, government forces are the ones protecting the
Christian minority there. "The Syrian Army is protecting the Christian
community [in Aleppo]," Reverend Raymond Moussalli says. "But if [the
Army] leaves, they will be massacred."

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - According to
Moussalli, roughly 200,000 Christians still reside in the war-torn
streets of Aleppo. He warns that if the Syrian Army retreats due to
attacks by Islamist rebels, the Christians "will be massacred." Moussalli
is the patriarchal vicar of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Jordan,
which borders Syria on the south. He has spent many years attending to
the spiritual needs to Christians who have fled from Iraq (along the
western border) into Amman, Jordan.Father Moussalli was among
more than 50 regional Christian leaders who joined with Muslim scholars,
who met at a conference in Amman against Western military intervention
into the region.Not surprisingly, very few - if any of the
scholars gathered there saw much use in military intervention. Father
Moussalli harshly criticized the West for supporting the Islamist rebels
in Syria. "If we [the West] are bombing Syria now, where are all the
Christians going? There are two million," he told the BBC.Currently,
there are about 2.5 million Christians in all of Syria, and an
estimated 220,000 in Aleppo, of which about 10 percent have fled because
of the rebel attacks, Moussalli says.Ignatius Joseph Younan,
patriarch of Antioch for the Syrian Catholic Church, added at the
conference that "We stress that we reject foreign interference in
Syria."Overall, there was high condemnation for the war drums
being pounded upon by the West against Syria - and elsewhere. "We don't
accept any intervention by foreign powers . to protect minorities," Pope
Anba Tawadros II, head of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, in
Egypt said. "It [intervention] is basically a pretext . to advance their
countries' interest in the Middle East."There are an estimated
500,000 members of the Chaldean Catholic Church in the Middle East,
which is in complete unity with the Holy See in Rome under the
leadership of Pope Francis. The Chaldean Catholic Church traces its
origins back to Thomas the Apostle and its liturgical languages are
Syriac and Aramaic, the latter the language that Jesus Christ Himself
primarily spoke.Of the estimated 2.5 million Christians in
Syria, most are Eastern Orthodox followed by Eastern Catholics, which
includes the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholic
Church.